Actually, he’s proving it. The actor who made his reputation in crime dramas of the 1980s such as “The Untouchables,” “8 Million Ways to Die,” “The Godfather: Part III” and “Internal Affairs,” is now, at 57, turning into quite the cutup.

“It’s not the image most people have of me, unless they know me as a friend,” Garcia says of the word “comedian.” “I’m not consciously looking for comic roles now, but I’ve always been attracted to the genre. It’s something I’m comfortable in, but I have to find the material.

“It’s correct that I was lucky to get known as an actor dramatically,” the Cuba-born, Florida-raised Garcia continued. “Once people want to hire you, they obviously attach a certain persona to what you do, so usually it was a dramatic part or an antagonist in a film. That was fine by me, but I always had this interest in comedy. My early days in Hollywood, I was a member of an improvisational group at the Comedy Store.”

Even when he was cast in comedies, like the “Ocean’s 11” caper films, Garcia was more often than not still relegated to straight man or unfunny villain status. Things changed big time for him five years ago, however, when the charming comedy “City Island” brought out Garcia’s gentler amusing characteristics.

The actor was a producer on that film, and he was again for his latest release, “At Middleton,” in which he acts sillier than ever.

“Usually, these things are opportunities that I created for myself,” Garcia says of the funny stuff. “It’s one thing to say, ‘I like the script, call me if you ever have the money to make it and see ya later.’ Or, if you really are enamored with it and you want to do it, you’ll have to take some of the responsibility for getting it made, and that’s what I did.”

In director Adam Rodgers’ and producer Glenn German’s “Middleton” script, Garcia plays George, a buttoned-down, bow tie-wearing heart surgeon accompanying his teenage son (Spencer Lofranco) on a tour of Middleton College’s campus. In the same group of parents and prospective students are Edith (Vera Farmiga) and her daughter Audrey, played by Farmiga’s younger sister Taissa.

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Edith is as free of a spirit as George is uptight. However, she persuades him to ditch the tour (and their kids) for a day of what can be described as freshman high jinks: stealing bicycles, crashing drama classes, getting high and, perhaps, falling in love.

Known himself as a fairly conservative father of four, Toluca Lake resident Garcia cautions against reading too much of Andy into George’s increasingly uninhibited antics. But he also emphasizes that there’s a great deal of himself in every character he plays.

“I bring my sensibility and my imagination, my entire life that I’ve led feeds everything that I do,” he points out. “You have 20 actors play this part, they’re all going to play it differently. But you cannot assume that I’d react like George in similar situations. That’s how George reacts in those situations. It’s not a documentary.”

We only asked because he’s really funny in one scene in which George and Edith end up in a young couple’s dorm room (the girl in the scene, by the way, is played by the leading man’s daughter, Daniella Garcia-Lorido). A bong is broken out and the older folks get remarkably blitzed. We thought, you know, he did grow up in Florida in the ’70s, so was any sense memory or anything like that applied to that sequence?

“We’ve all seen enough stoner movies to know what it’s like,” Garcia allows. “Personal observations probably went into it, but you know, if I kill somebody in a movie, nobody asks me if I’ve ever killed somebody. But you see me smoke pot in a movie, and you ask if I’ve ever smoked pot. I mean, who cares if I have or haven’t? Of course, people care if I’ve killed somebody or not!”

A theme that runs through “At Middleton” involves even these temporarily irresponsible parents coming to terms with the fact that their children are about to leave the nest. With two college graduate daughters and a third in her senior year, Garcia knows what that feels like, but claims to have suffered no melancholy over it.

“I was eager for the kids to have that experience,” he recalls. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh please don’t leave the house, where are you going?’ Of course you miss them when they go away, but it’s time for them to fly, you know? They need to experience life and you hope that you’ve given them enough education and an example so that, when they have to make a decision that maybe has some moral implications, hopefully they’ll take a beat and reflect on what’s the proper thing to do.”

Garcia’s own parents left Cuba with him shortly after Fidel Castro came to power. They restarted from nothing in South Florida and eventually thrived. Their son remains firmly opposed to Havana’s communist regime, despite some slight recent loosening of state authority and the elderly Castro brothers’ inevitable demise.

“I’m looking forward to a free Cuba, for sure, but I don’t think that’s ever going to happen while the Castros are in charge,” he says. “They haven’t indicated, in 55 years, that they’re interested in any aspects of human rights for the Cuban people. So what’s going to change? Absolutely nothing. You have to have a complete changeover of the system.”

As for his own future, Garcia has a couple of other comedies — “Let’s Be Cops” and “Rob the Mob” — coming up, but notes that he plays dangerous guys in both of them. He’s still pretty happy with how his career is going at the moment, and for a guy who’s had his share of professional ups and downs, that’s no laughing matter.

“They come in spurts,” he says of good projects. “Sometimes you get lucky and you get things thrown your way that you’re stimulated by or that you can get done. That’s the nature of the beast.”